Who lives in the extended family and why? The case of Japan

By Satomi Kurosu

Goode 1963 predicted that the forces of industrialization and urbanization will affect all known societies and move them to some type of conjugal family. The recent studies show however, the movement from extended family to nuclear family has not been unidirectional and nor has it been a simple response to the development of industrial society (Levy, 1965; Laslett, 1972).

Extended family refers to a family including a nuclear family and its kin, whose members live together in the same household. The extended family’s exist depends on three factors: 1) Demographic, i.e. the availabilities of kin; 2) economic, a financial means to support members in an extended family; availability of welfare and social care within community and society; 3) normative factor, the social norm and ideology sustaining force, such as civil code, mass propaganda, ideological indoctrination in the school etc.

The demographic approach is demographic constrains on the formation of extended family.

The economic approach emphasizes the material conditions that give rise to a particular family pattern. In traditional peasant economics, the family was organized in the way that kept family property or land intact. Therefore, the size or type of family property and the choice of heir (primogeniture or ultimogeniture) mattered for the formation of family. In the industrialized society, family extension can be seen as a strategy for easing the economic demands of marriage. The extended family serves as a resource to conjugal unit.

The finding of this research paper: it supports Goode’s theory, conjugal ideology and economic correlates of industrialization is social and geographic mobility, a decreasing family role in determining the occupations of the offspring and functional differentiation of the social structure play major role in explaining he extended family. These two forces were found to work against the persistence of extended family in Japan.

The author also observed attenuated effects of normative factors, esp, the ideology, on the extended family among younger age group. The extended family system appeared to adapt into the new form of a joint living arrangement of two or more conjugal unties.